Quotes from Italo Calvino

I have come to realize that Mr. Kauderer's presence is important for me: that someone still evinces so much scrupulousness and methodical attention, though I know perfectly well it is all futile, has a reassuring effect on me perhaps because it makes up for my vague way of living, about which—despite the conclusions I have reached—I continue to feel guilty.

The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

The city outside there has no name yet, we don't know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free of the station and the bar: it is not wise for me to move away from here where they might still come looking for me, or for me to be seen by other people with this burdensome suitcase.

At times I am gripped by an absurd desire: that the sentence I am about to write be the one the woman is reading at that same moment. The idea mesmerizes me so much that I convince myself it is true: I write the sentence hastily, get up, go to the window, train my spyglass to check the effect of my sentence in her gaze, in the curl of her lips, in the cigarette she lights, in the shifts of her body in the deck chair, in her legs, which she crosses or extends.

Ogni incontro di due esseri umani al mondo è uno sbranarsi. Vieni con me, io ho la coscienza di questo male e sarai più sicura che con chiunque altro; perchè io faccio del male come tutti lo fanno, ma a differenza degli altri, io ho la mano sicura.

Decide for yourself. Everybody reacts in a different way.

At times it seems to me that the distance between my writing and her reading is unbridgeable, that whatever I write bears the stamp of artifice and incongruity; if what I am writing were to appear on the polished surface of the page she is reading, it would rasp like a fingernail on a pane, and she would fling the book away with horror.

We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller.

Mentre Arturo corre già verso il lavoro, Elide mette a posto la casa, scuotendo il capo per le faccende mal fatte da lui. Dopodiché va a letto, striscia il piede dalla parte del marito, ma si accorge ogni volta che dove dorme lei è più caldo, segno che anche Arturo ha dormito lì, e ne prova una grande tenerezza.

The thing I'd like most in the world," I said to her, since at this point I might as well go on talking with her, "is to make clocks run backward." The woman gives some ordinary answer, such as, "You only have to move the hands." "No, with thought, by concentrating until I force time back," I say.

You, reader, believed that there, on the platform, my gaze was glued to the hands of the round clock of an old station, hands pierced like halberds, in the vain attempt to turn them back, to move backward over the cemetery of spent hours, lying lifeless in their circular pantheon.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others.

If I knew how to draw, I would apply myself only to studying the form of inanimate objects," I said somewhat imperiously, because I wanted to change the subject and also because a natural inclination does truly lead me to recognize my moods in the motionless suffering of things. Miss

Il viaggiatore riconosce il poco che è suo, scoprendo il molto che non ha avuto e non avrà.

Il vento, venendo in città da lontano, le porta doni inconsueti, di cui s'accorgono solo poche anime sensibili, come i raffreddati del fieno, che starnutano per pollini di fiori d'altre terre.

E poi non sapevo più cosa guardare e guardai il cielo.

But the others also had wronged the Z'zus, to begin with, by calling them 'immigrants', on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z'zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of 'immigrant' could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

Certo il costo da pagare è alto ma dobbiamo accettarlo: non poterci distinguere dai tanti segnali che passano per questa via, ognuno con un suo significato che resta nascosto e indecifrabile perché fuori di qui non c'è più nessuno capace di riceverci e d'intenderci.

Cosimo si gettò nel folto: avrebbe voluto che fosse mille volte più folto, una valanga di foglie e rami e spini e caprifogli e capelveneri da affondarci e sprofondarci e solo dopo essercisi del tutto sommerso cominciare a capire se era felice o folle di paura.

To be able to read the classics you have to know "from where" you are reading them; otherwise both the book and the reader will be lost in a timeless cloud.

There is a place where spiders make their nests. Only Pin knows it. He's the only one in the whole valley, perhaps in the whole area. No other boy except Pin has ever heard of spiders that make nests. Perhaps one day Pin will find a friend, a real friend, who understands him and whom he can understand, and then to him, and only to him, will he show the place where the spiders have their lairs.

I read, therefore it writes